De-duplicating software listing

If there are both a snap and deb version available in Software (Ubuntu 18.04 daily build) the software is showing up multiple times. They don’t share screenshots/description/reviews etc., it looks messy and this will become even more noticeable having flatpaks listed in there as well.

In Discover (KDE) they are now de-duplicating the source results so that the software is only showing up once. When users click on a application they can do a selection from the available sources, much similar to that users can select different snap channels.

https://s1.gifyu.com/images/the-future-of-software-delivery-2018-01-14_20.21.19.gif

Are there any plans doing similar de-duplication for Ubuntu Software?

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This seems very much like a discussion of how-do-we-fix-this-bug.
Are you actually interested in participating to fix the bug?
If so, what research have you done among the bug reports?

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According to the snappy developers, de-duplication in GNOME Software for snaps depends on AppStream ID support, which is still being worked on.

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@ian-weisser Sorry for being a little unclear. I could not find any bug reports, but I thought this problem was a bit too obvious to not find any so my intention was to ask before filing a bug report.

@ads20000 Thank you very much for pointing it out!

A mid-way solution could be to set additional filters like “show only snaps” “show only debs” “show all” for the whole software center. But could this be implemented into gnome-software without touching the software code and only via the snap plugin?

The problem is that most users don’t care about what package format their software is in, but we do want deduplication…I suppose it could be a compromise solution whilst snappy grows features to deal with AppStream? Is this what you mean by ‘mid-way solution’?

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